Monday, May 16, 2011

Points to watch out for TV application design

Internet TV is the craze now and the demand for TV application developer is high, mainly due to the lack of efficient TV app developer. I had been working on a TV project for the past months and had been mentally taking notes of the potential pitfalls in transiting from developing for the web to developing for the tube.

1. A clean minimalistic web design does not work on TV. The tv have a huge screen space that will become significally awkward with your minimalistic design. Having nice large graphics or videos is a 'easy' method for filling up the awkwardness.

2.Elastic fantastic!TV application design really focuses a lot on the elasticity of your image, header, sidebar .... etc. Do not assume all TV are widescreen.

3. Plenty of testing... on a REAL TV!No. A 21inch LCD monitor will not give you as relevant feedback as testing your app on a TV. Other than screen resolution problem, you have to watch out for colors too.

4. Use CSS3 to replace javascript animation as much as possibleUsing the hardware-accelerated css3 transition will give you a much better performance on a large screen. From my observation, Firefox (4.0) seems to be the most affected browser when the screen size is enlarged. The browser that performed the best is google chrome. Performance in this case refers to the smoothness of the animation.

Friday, November 5, 2010

Creating the new "Office for Mac 2011" icon

The new “Office for Mac 2011” icons are stunning and sophisticated.Microsoft has engaged the help of company called Frog Design to help them create a new line of icons for their 2011 version of the Office for Mac.With the help of grids and pen tool, it is really not that hard to come up with a similar design. This tutorial will capture the essence of the icons.

PSD Available (5% will be donated to charity):

Download entire tutorial(5% will be donated to charity):

Grids and Circles

Step 1: Create a 100px X 100px circle. I drew the circle with the help of grid-lines. Set vertical grid lines at 150px and 250px and horizontal grid lines at 150px and 250px. Name the layer “Circle”. Give it the layer properties as shown below

Step 2: Set another vertical grid line at 300px and 350px. Duplicate the ‘Circle’ layer and move the circle until it’s center is at the 300px gridline. Do this for the rest of the circles in the illustration below. Use gridline to help u achieve accuracy.

Step 3: Group all the layers together and call it ‘Blueprint’ or whatever name you can concoct.

Pen Tool

Step 4: Use Pen tool and start plotting the points according to illustration below. Name the layer ‘P-bright’.

Creating the rounded corners

Step 5: A very easy technique that i always use to create a rounded corner are as follow:

Add anchor point.

Use ‘Direct Selection Tool’ to drag the point to create some curvature.

Use ‘Convert Point Tool’ on the two handle bar to increase the curvature until it forms a nice rounded corner.

Another example:

Step 6: Apply this technique to all the corners that need rounding except on the exterior side of the “P”. For that side, you will need to delete the existing anchor point there first before applying the above technique to round it.

This is what you will get after rounding the corners. The basic shape of the icon is done. What we will need to do now is to give it some depth.

Giving Depth

Step 7: Duplicate the ‘P-bright’ layer and rename it ‘P-dark’ layer. Make sure it is on top of the ‘P-bright’ layer.

Step 8:Delete the anchor points that are shown below and adjust the handles to get the desired shapes

Step 9:Add another anchor point and delete the other anchor point as shown in the diagram. Adjust the handlebars again to get desired shape

Step 10: Select the anchor points that made up the tail of ‘P’ and shift them to the right.Add another anchor point before deleting the bottom anchor points to get the shape shown in the illustration below

I found an excellent explanation from net-Tuts regarding the "?" above:

Think of everything before the question mark as being a question, if the answer to that question is true then execute the code to the left of the colon, but after the question mark. If the answer is false then execute the code after the colon.

The rest are just simple animation to mimic the shuffling action and also to reattach the active class to the images.